Neo-Logisms

My friend protests my creation of new words: peoplehood and reshalomification are two of the offenders.

Although I cannot cite them to justify my own onslaught on the English language, Lewis used poethood, while Chesterton used topsyturvydom many times. In his "The Dragon's Grandmother" Chesterton pulled out pumpkinity -- the whole phrase is infinitely protracted pumpkinity. Oh my.

Truth, Not Fact

The following words are by the Voice speaking from behind the protagonist in CS Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress (1933):

“Child, if you will, it is mythology. It is but truth, not fact: an image, not the very real. But then it is My mythology....[T]his is My inventing, this is the veil under which I have chosen to appear even from the first until now. For this end I made your senses and for this end your imagination, that you might see My face and live.... [W]as there any age in any land when men did not know that corn and wine were the blood and body of a dying and yet living God?”

The “veil” is the myth of the dying and rising “corn-king,” -- a term Lewis used in his “Grand Miracle,” Miracles (1947). But the biblical story is also the form in which the Voice has “chosen to appear.”

(to be completed)

The Value of CS Lewis

I have just finished reading student essays on Lewis's The Great Divorce. What strikes me is how much people can learn from Lewis about the meaning of life, from a Christian perspective.

To enable them to interpret GD, students read Mere Christianity -- book four, Beyond Personality is the key -- and selections from The Problem of Pain, Miracles, Letters to Malcolm, The Four Loves, "Transposition," and The Chronicles of Narnia:

• "Heaven"
• "Hell"
• "Christianity and Religion"
  
• "The Grand Miracle"
• the story in The Silver Chair about the confrontation between a witch preaching projectionism and believers in Aslan
• the story of Emeth in The Last Battle

What students learn is that the purpose of human life is to be "taken into the life of God" -- theosis! All of one's pursuits are to be oriented to this one end (telos). The person experiences a longing (Sehnsucht) for this end, but is prone to choose other ends (power, sex, intoxication) to fill the emptiness within -- "How easily the longing accepts false objects, and through what dark ways the pursuit of them leads us," Lewis wrote in 1943.

These freely chosen ends become one's hell, when viewed from the perspective of eternity. On the other hand, if one chooses to identify one's hobbies, friends, and aesthetic desires as pointers to one's telos, the human person can begin to experience the bliss -- heaven -- for which God has designed the human person.

The key for the person is to submit, to release oneself, to the "treatment" of the Creator. This is a death to Self, but a Yes to one's Design. The No dis-orders the person, but the Yes aims one at the God-designed home port.

The Significance of Daily Choices

“[E]very time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.” (CS Lewis, MC 3.4)

Lewis shows the impact of choices in The Great Divorce: in the afterlife, ghosts who choose Self as God progressively de-create themselves, from the inside out. The ghosts are shells -- transparent insubstantial Un-man -- doomed to the hell they create for themselves.

The Angry Young Man Turns Fifty

Apocalypto turned 50 recently. My friends and loved ones from my youth asked me about what it means to be 50. I do not know. I crossed no threshold of which I am aware, but the arbitrary 5 x 10. I am no fatter, grayer, or wiser, but I have been become reflective because of the recent death of a childhood friend.

Friends from my life have recently reconnected with me because I have passed this milestone, and others who I have not seen for three decades are on my mind. More important is the death of Heidi, who was a couple of years younger than me. Her death did not encourage me to change myself, to safeguard my health, pursue longevity, etc.

Rather, Heidi's death just makes me cold, empty -- I cannot name it, but I feel a loss -- yet I had hardly seen her in 30+ years. If it is supposed to wake me up, what I can see is how mercenary I am. But I feel for the absence felt by her family.

What strikes me about 50 is how unworthy of it I am. Where is the wisdom, the stability, etc. of an experience-worn wanderer?